They Gave the Doomed Duke the Wrong Bride novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Wrong Veil
Bryony is married to a doomed duke's sword in her sister's veil, the crown exiles his family that night, and she empties his house with her mother's key until a knife touches her throat in the vault.
My sister pinned her own wedding veil on my head and told me to smile, because I was marrying a dead man.
"Hold still," Seraphine said. "If you bleed on my lace, Father will take it out of your supper."
The pin went in a little too deep.
I didn't flinch.
I had eight years of practice not flinching in that house.
The gown was hers too. Ivory lace, cut for a girl two inches shorter, so my ankles showed.
Nobody had asked me to wear it.
At breakfast my father had put down his cup and said, "Bryony, you'll be a duchess by noon. Wash your face."
I'd thought it was a joke.
My father didn't make jokes to me. He made lists.
"The Duke of Draycott is doomed," he said, buttering his bread. "The King promised him a Penhallow daughter a year ago, and the King's promise stands. But your sister is promised to the Crown Prince now. She's worth more."
"And I'm worth nothing."
"You're worth exactly what I need today, girl. Don't make me say it twice."
Seraphine laughed into her chocolate.
That was the whole proposal.
Now she stepped back and looked at me in the mirror.
"There," she said. "You look almost legitimate."
The Draycott chapel smelled of cold stone and old incense.
Half the court had come to watch.
Not to celebrate. To stare.
Four months ago the Duke's army had died in the snow at the Gallow Pass. Four thousand men.
The court said he ran. The court said he sold them.
Nobody had found his body.
So I married his sword.
It lay on a velvet cushion at the altar, long and plain, with a nick in the guard.
The priest read the vows to it.
I said "I will" to a piece of steel while somebody in the third row whispered, "The bastard and the traitor. How fitting."
My father, Count Leopold Penhallow, stood in the front pew with his gold chain on and his face arranged into sorrow.
Across the aisle sat the Dowager Duchess.
Isobel Draycott wore black wool and a jet brooch, and she didn't look at the sword once.
She looked at me.
After the vows she came down the aisle, stopped in front of me, and spoke low enough for only me to hear.
"I asked for a Penhallow daughter," she said. "They sent me the kitchen one."
"I can go back to the kitchen," I said. "It's warmer than your chapel."
Her eyes narrowed.
Beside her, a skinny boy of about eleven with a mop of black hair snorted, then turned it into a cough.
That was Ned, the Duke's little brother.
The feast was worse.
Long tables. Cold venison. Toasts nobody finished.
I sat at the head of the table beside an empty chair with the sword laid across it.
Halfway through the second course the doors at the end of the hall opened.
A royal herald walked in with six guards in palace red.
The room went quiet.
He unrolled a scroll.
"By order of the Crown," he read, "Everard Draycott, Duke of Draycott, is declared a traitor and dead at the Gallow Pass. His house, his lands and all his goods are forfeit to the Crown, to be taken at dawn. His mother, his brother and his wife are sentenced to exile in the Frostmere March for life. So are the families of every officer who served him."
Somebody dropped a goblet.
Ned grabbed his mother's sleeve.
Isobel didn't move at all.
His wife.
That was me.
I had been a wife for two hours.
I looked down the table at my father.
He was cutting his venison.
He didn't look surprised.
He looked like a man ticking the last line off a list.
Seraphine caught my eye and raised her glass to me.
Then they were gone, my father and my sister and the whole staring court, out into their carriages.
Guards stood at every door with orders that nothing leave the house before dawn.
The servants wept in the kitchen.
Isobel took Ned upstairs without a word to me.
I went to the room they'd given me and sat on the bed in my sister's gown.
Frostmere.
Forty days north. Snow eight months of the year. Exiles went there to die quietly where the court didn't have to watch.
I took the cord from around my neck.
On the end of it hung a black iron key, plain and heavy, no bigger than my finger.
My mother gave it to me the winter she died. I was twelve.
"For when they don't feed you," she'd said.
They often didn't.
So I learned what it did.
When I shut a door with the key in my fist, everything in the room behind the door went somewhere else.
A cold stone room as big as a church. A larder only I could walk into.
Bread stayed warm there. Milk stayed sweet.
For eleven years I'd used it to hide crusts from the cook.
I had never stolen with it.
I'd been too afraid of what my father would do.
I stood up.
He'd just done it.
I took off my sister's shoes so I wouldn't make noise on the stairs.
The pantry first. Hams, flour, oil, sacks of oats.
I shut the door with the key tight in my hand, and when I opened it again the shelves were bare to the wall.
The linen room. Wool blankets and furs.
The armory at the end of the east passage. Crossbows. Spears. Mail. A hundred bolts in barrels.
The stillroom, with its jars of salve and willow bark.
The boot room.
My heart was going so hard I could hear it.
The treasury was last.
An iron door at the end of the long gallery, under the portrait of a clean-shaven boy of seventeen with gray eyes.
The Duke, before the war.
The lock was nothing. My father had taught me locks, so I could fetch his ledgers when he was too drunk to find the key.
Inside, the chests stood open and full.
Gold. Plate. The Draycott jewels.
I shut the door on it.
When I opened it, there was only stone and the smell of dust.
I stepped into the empty vault to be sure.
Cold steel touched the side of my throat.
A man's body stood close behind me in the dark, and a hand closed over my wrist with the key in it.
"Who are you?" a low voice said against my ear. "You're not the Penhallow girl."
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